During his emergence in the 1950s, a golden age for original television drama which nurtured many fine writers, including Paddy Chayefsky, Robert Alan Aurthur, and Rod Serling, Rose tailored his craft to the particular strengths of the medium. His scripts were topical and controversial; he used narrow, often indoor settings, and he centered conflicts on small but crucial individual moral choices. As a writer of motion pictures, Rose has continued to produce the kind of social, timely, personal dramas he created for television. Rose's main subjects are crime; juvenile delinquency; the problems of children and adolescents; and contemporary social issues, including bigotry, poverty, and urban blight. He has treated these problems in a variety of forms--Westerns, war movies, urban and courtroom dramas--but however exotic or prosaic the setting and whatever the form, at its best Rose's work is powerful, committed, intense; at its worst it is didactic or descends from drama into sociology.
Rose's first screenplay was for Crime in the Streets (1956), about teenage gang members who plan but do not carry out the murder of an old man who has slapped their psychotic leader, Frankie (John Cassavetes). The film ends in a confrontation between Frankie and the younger brother (Sal Mineo) of another gang member who talks Frankie out of the crime by professing love and concern for his brother.
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